Ease of the purchase and order fulfillment experience, for any product or service, is one of the contributors to customer decisions to purchase from one particular business over another. The rise of online shopping is a good example where ease of use is leading to an increase of use, as customers decide to forego traffic, waiting in queues, parking hassles, and other problems with brick-and-mortar retailers by ordering from the comfort of their homes. Competing with online merchants has proven a significant challenge for brick-and-mortar retailers, even those with a web presence. It takes less time and money to order from home than to travel to a store, look for parking, pay for parking, walk to the store, peruse as they would on-line, wait in payment line, then do it all again in reverse order to return home. The wait times in particular pose a great challenge to brick-and-mortar retailers, especially in urban areas where a customer is likely to leave the queue and go to a competing store with shorter queues.
However, visiting locations associated with traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, such as storefronts, warehouses, service centers, and/or the like, may remain preferable for customers with time-relevant needs, as picking up an item from a nearby retail location may still be faster than waiting for a delivery to arrive. Likewise, for perishable goods such as food take-out, or for personal goods such as dry-cleaning, visiting a brick-and-mortar retailer may remain the most practical option. For prepared food or simple errands, take-out/pickup may be an increasingly popular option, especially when it can be done as part of an efficient travel stream in a string of errands. Brick-and-mortar retailers should be playing up this inherent advantage, and should try to minimize the greatest difficulties of visiting retail locations: waiting in a queue to place an order and then waiting additional time for the ordered products to be ready.